Conclusion

The conclusion draws together ideas from the book, suggesting a few key points. First, it draws attention to the cultural agency of ‘exemplars’, or what folklorists have sometimes called ‘star performers’. Singers and storytellers like Henri Vidal, Marie Bouzats, or Catherine Gentes are not just important because they were typical, but because they played leading roles in local cultures. The conclusion argues that such exemplars allow historians to perceive changing cultures of the body which cannot be reduced to the simple advent of a ‘modern’ body. The example of the moorlands of Gascony suggests broader patterns in the history of the body during the period of modernization.

Exploited Bodies

This chapter analyses a tale about an unfortunate fox told by a man named Henri Vidal. While Henri’s tale is similar to other stories of not-so-cunning foxes collected by folklorists across France, it is also a profoundly local story. It makes sense as a kind of fictionalized autobiography of Henri himself, a critique of the system of sharecropping that predominated in the moorlands, and the violence and exploitation that this system encouraged. Through comparison to other tales told by other storytellers, the chapter suggests ways that ordinary workers like Henri used stories to narrate their experiences, and negotiate better lives.

Body Talk

This chapter uses Félix Arnaudin’s notes towards a dictionary of the Gascon dialect of the Landes de Gascogne to explore everyday speech about the body. The dialect notes that Arnaudin carefully recorded in quotidian situations draw attention to a body focused on the legs and buttocks, discussed in terms of constant concern about stooping and bending. The language of the body was often violent and obscene, but could also be delicate and specific. Rich metaphors for body parts drew parallels between human exploitation and forestation. This was not a static folk language of the body, swept away by ‘modern’ ideas of the body, but an evolving way of talking about bodily experiences.

Singers and Storytellers

In order to understand the folk traditions that Félix Arnaudin recorded, it is important to consider who his informants were. Félix Arnaudin prided himself on his honesty in how he presented these informants, but this chapter suggests that this honesty was only ever partial. Research drawing on birth, marriage, and death certificates, notarial documents, and other sources suggests that Félix Arnaudin exaggerated the age of his informants, and put more emphasis on informants who worked in ‘traditional’ occupations, such as pastoralism, even though many of his singers and storytellers worked in ‘modern’ occupations, as employees of the state, for example.

Introduction

This chapter situates the book as an intervention in discussions of the history of the body, suggesting that the experiences of the working population have often been absent from discussions of changing bodily cultures, which have instead tended to focus on elite discourses. The chapter suggests that the moorlands of Gascony in south-western France make a particularly powerful example, because of the scale and speed of top-down reforms of the landscape following a national law passed in 1857, which encouraged the forestation of the moorlands. The region also boasts one of the most impressive ethnographic archives, thanks to the work of the folklorist Félix Arnaudin (1844–1921). The chapter finishes with an outline of key methodologies drawn from folklore studies, including the study of performance, variation, and traceability.

Silence and Chastity

This chapter complements Chapter 6. It focuses on one of Arnaudin’s most prolific singers, a woman named Catherine Gentes. Rather than what Catherine sang, the chapter asks what she did not. By leaving verses out of well-known songs, or by refusing to sing whole songs, Catherine created a very different personal repertoire of singing to the picture presented in Chapter 6 of the bawdy singing of the moorlands. The chapter replaces these singing choices in her life, suggesting that her identity as a seamstress and her physical impairment would have encouraged her community to sexualize her. The fact that she systematically avoided bawdy singing material suggests some of the ways that she attempted to forge an alternative identity, which did not necessarily draw on Catholic models of female chastity.

Singing Love

This chapter explores the folk songs Arnaudin collected. It discusses them by drawing attention to two key features: firstly, to the bawdiness of the songs of the moorlands, and secondly, to the dominance of female singers. The chapter argues that women used the shared culture of singing about making love in order to criticize the constraints they felt on their bodily autonomy. Whether or not there had ever been a time of freer romantic relations, the chapter discusses how songs allowed women to complain about things they found painful in the present, such as gossip and a culture of shaming.

Monstrous Bodies

This chapter turns to the example of werewolf stories, with a particular focus on one storyteller, named Marie Bouzats. It situates Marie’s werewolf stories in a wider shared French culture of shapeshifters and monsters. The chapter argues that werewolf stories were rarely as violent or as extreme as the later popular cultural representations of werewolves in films and literature would be. Instead, stories of shapeshifters express subtle anxieties about boundaries and interpersonal relationships in face-to-face communities. Werewolf stories explore issues of religion, gender, and family, and in the case of the moorlands of Gascony, of changing landscapes.

Arnaudin and the Moorlands

This chapter provides an overview of Félix Arnaudin’s life. Born into a moderately wealthy family in the Landes de Gascogne, Arnaudin struggled with his place in local society. Unwilling and unable to go into working to exploit the business opportunities of forestation, he dedicated most of his life instead to documenting the folk traditions and language of his native region. A meticulous and thorough ethnographer and photographer, he embraced the newer fieldwork methods of the golden generation of French folklorists. Unlike many of his more famous contemporaries, however, Arnaudin published very little of the material he collected during his own lifetime.